The Centre has over 80 volunteers who are the heart of the organisation and fulfil a wide range of roles. Our volunteers span a wide age range, have diverse backgrounds and spend anything from two hours a fortnight to two days a week helping.

Being a volunteer at the Holly Lodge Centre can be immensely rewarding and fun.

Our volunteers’ contribution to the Centre totals over 6,000 hours a year, equivalent to £49,260 (valued at the London living wage), which is almost as much as we raise from grants, donations and events annually. They undertake a variety of roles:

Education:Volunteers lead or assist with delivering activities to both special educational needs and mainstream schools in both our Natural World and Heritage activities. Many education volunteers have a teaching background, but this is not a requirement.

Maintenance:We have a team of volunteers who maintain the Centre’s facilities and participate in varied projects, from building new cupboards to making improvements to the nature trail.

Events:A group of volunteers oversee our annual fund-raising events. This involves developing new ideas, organising and publicising an event, marketing tickets and ensuring the events run smoothly on the day.

Fund-raising, marketing and communications, administration, IT and finance:Each of these functions has a small team. Such roles may include preparing and submitting applications for funding to trusts, managing our donation schemes; maintaining our website and social media channels, circulating communications to supporters, and administering the Centre day-to-day.

Specialist advice and help:We have a group of individuals who advise and/or provide specialist skills. These include education development, graphic design and branding, website upgrading, project management, landscape design, and conservation and ecology.

Many volunteers do more than one thing: there are many opportunities for using your existing skills or trying something new!

We currently have the following opportunities for volunteers:

Art group leaders - we are looking for some creative people to join our friendly art group. The weekly sessions for adults with learning difficulties, take place on a Monday morning.

Event organisers - are you super organised? We are looking for one or two volunteers to join our events team organising our fundraising events. We have a series of successful events that we organise each year, we need some help to organise these.

If there is a volunteer opportunity that you are interested in then please contact the Centre Manager, Anna King at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or download the form here and return it to her. She will then invite you to come and see the Centre and have an informal chat.